Not long before I started school a couple years ago I saved my hard earned (ill-gotten?) cash and bought myself the cheapest, simplest 4x5 camera I could find, a Cambo 45NXII.

Right in the middle of a shoot last week, I'm trying to get the focus right on a dessert with mint leaves that literally wilted in about 30 seconds, and my focus knob falls off. Like, completely. I turn it and it comes loose and falls on the floor. And it won't go back on. Something is stripped. Something that is probably very expensive to replace. In the meantime? I have a camera that I can't focus.

This camera always sort of sucked. I bought it because it was cheap, and it had completely simple controls. I really didn't know anything about shooting large format at the time except that you could make really weird out of focus parts in your picture if you swung the front and back standards different directions. I didn't see the point of "yaw free tilt" or "geared fine focus" knobs. After all, I was going to be a fine art photographer. How things change.

Needless to say, after almost three years of screaming obscenities at this thing when I have to shove the front standard too far one way and then shove it back to focus instead of turning a little knob that moves it a half millimeter at a time til it's perfect... well, I'm beginning to see the point of all those thousand dollar features. That, and the fact that those nice ones? They probably have focusing knobs that also stay attached to the camera, unlike mine.

This is like the decision to fix your shitty old car one more time when you know it's going to break again. When do you finally just bite the bullet and get the shiny new one you know you can't afford?